Adam Serwer

According to the law, Robert Morris was a criminal. The second Black lawyer in the history of the United States, Morris was among a group of abolitionists who, in 1851, stormed a Boston courtroom to free Shadrach Minkins, an escaped slave from Virginia. Minkins had been detained under the Fugitive Slave Act and was to be returned to his master.
Morris filed a writ of habeas corpus on Minkins’s behalf, but the effort failed because Minkins was property in the eyes of the law.

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For as long as I’ve been alive, American presidents have defined tyrants by their willingness to use military force against their own people in reprisal for political opposition. This was a staple of Cold War presidential rhetoric, and it survived long into the War on Terror era.

The first time President Donald Trump tried to institute a travel ban to prevent large numbers of immigrants and visitors from reaching the United States, back in 2017, massive protests erupted at major airports across the country. This time, at least so far, there has been nothing of the sort. The disparity in reactions helps illustrate how habituated Americans have become to a president who wields his power with discriminatory intentions.

The Trump administration’s relentless assault on the rule of law is a kind of arson: It is setting so many blazes that the fire department is having trouble putting them all out at once. Last week, Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court to cut off the water.

The arrest of Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan over allegedly obstructing the apprehension of an undocumented immigrant is an attempt to intimidate the judiciary. You can just ask Attorney General Pam Bondi.
“What has happened to our judiciary is beyond me,” Bondi told Fox News, commenting on Dugan’s arrest. “They’re deranged. I think some of these judges think they are beyond and above the law, and they are not.

The arrest of Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan over allegedly obstructing the apprehension of an undocumented immigrant is an attempt to intimidate the judiciary. You can just ask Attorney General Pam Bondi.
“What has happened to our judiciary is beyond me,” Bondi told Fox News, commenting on Dugan’s arrest. “They’re deranged. I think some of these judges think they are beyond and above the law, and they are not.

This story was updated on April 10, 2025 at 9:27 pm.
America has reached a very dangerous moment, as the Supreme Court’s indulgence of President Donald Trump’s belief in his own untrammeled authority collides with the justices’ expectation that he will abide by their decisions.

This article was updated on April 7, 2025, at 8:40 pm.
The Supreme Court is about to decide whether the Trump administration can exile Americans to a gulag overseas and then leave them there.
The Trump administration wants everyone to believe that the case challenging its deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador’s infamous Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, is about the government’s right to deport undocumented immigrants, or gang members, or terrorists.

The federal government has provided no evidence that Mahmoud Khalil has committed a criminal offense, and yet on Saturday night, he was taken by agents of the state from his home and renditioned to a detention facility where neither his pregnant wife nor his lawyer have had access to him.

The nostalgia behind the slogan “Make America great again” has always provoked the obvious questions of just when America was great, and for whom. Early in the second Trump administration, we are getting the answer.
In August, speaking with someone he believed to be a sympathetic donor, one of the Project 2025 architects, Russell Vought, said that a goal of the next Trump administration would be to “get us off of multiculturalism” in America.

Donald Trump is most likely not trying to intentionally assemble a Cabinet chock-full of people accused either of sexual assault or of enabling it, but if he were, he’d be killing it.
Former Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, who has been accused of “sexual encounters” with a minor and paying women for sex, withdrew his nomination for attorney general last month.

Donald Trump and J. D. Vance support a national ban on abortion. They are just calling it something else.
Since the justices Trump appointed to the Supreme Court provided the conservative majority necessary to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion, women in Republican-controlled states have been forced to flee their homes in order to receive lifesaving care. Some women have died or were treated only at the brink of death.

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Earlier this month, the self-identified “white nationalist” Donald Trump adviser Laura Loomer said that if Vice President Kamala Harris wins, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.”
Asked what he thought of Loomer’s remarks, the GOP vice-presidential candidate, J. D.

Palestinians have, since the start of Israeli retaliation for Hamas’s massacre on October 7 last year, been living through one of the worst calamities in an already tragic history. Attacks by the Israeli military have killed tens of thousands Palestinians in Gaza, and much of the region’s population of 2 million has been displaced—repeatedly—and remains at risk of starvation and illness.

As the Civil War began to rage in 1861, the American press became enraptured with an idea—that Giuseppe Garibaldi, the gallant Italian nationalist and erstwhile New Yorker who had become famous fighting wars of independence in two hemispheres, was willing to join the Union cause.
There was only one condition: The Union had to embrace emancipation.

The idea that Donald Trump is forcing the Republican Party to moderate its extreme positions on abortion and LGBTQ rights would make for an interesting story. So interesting, in fact, that the story was all over the mainstream press. The only problem with this very interesting story is that it didn’t happen.
On Monday, a draft of the GOP platform began circulating ahead of the Republican convention. The coverage of the platform’s position on abortion was remarkable in its uniformity.

Joe Biden must resign the presidency. The last person to do so was Richard Nixon, who left in disgrace after abusing the powers of his office. Nixon had to resign because he led an assault on American democracy. Biden must resign for the opposite reason: to give American democracy its best chance of surviving.
The American right has spent every day since Biden was nominated in 2020 presenting him as an incompetent, doddering old fool, incapable of discharging the responsibilities of the office.

There may be an insurrectionist justice on the Supreme Court, perhaps two. The New York Times reported yesterday that 10 days after a violent mob ransacked the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election and keep Donald Trump in power, an upside-down American flag flew outside the home of Justice Samuel Alito. At the time, Trump supporters were using the upside-down flag as a symbol of their belief in Trump’s lies that the election had been stolen.

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First impressions stick. After a big story hits, the initial conclusions can turn out to be wrong, or partly wrong, but the revisions are not what people remember. They remember the headlines in imposing font, the solemn tone from a presenter, the avalanche of ironic summaries on social media.

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It was always unlikely that the Supreme Court, with its right-wing majority, would uphold Colorado’s ruling throwing Donald Trump off the ballot merely because he tried to execute a coup after losing the 2020 election. As the unanimous per curiam ruling issued Monday overturning Colorado’s decision suggests, a Court made up of nine liberal justices may not have done so either.

Ulysses S. Grant once said that the Confederate cause, the defense of chattel slavery, was “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.” Texas’s embrace of neo-secessionist rhetoric in defense of letting children drown in the Rio Grande belongs somewhere on that same list.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott is engaged in a number of legal battles with the Biden administration over immigration.

The collapse of Republican resolve in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election on January 6, 2021, and Trump’s continued designs on power have together ensured that conservatives find it necessary to downplay or dismiss those events as much less than what they were: an assault on American democracy.
This much was predictable. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, my colleague David A.

In the short weeks since the Colorado Supreme Court threw Donald Trump off the ballot on the grounds that he is barred from office for engaging in “insurrection or rebellion” under the Fourteenth Amendment, the apologists for a man who tried to overthrow the constitutional order by fraud and then force have become pious apostles of democracy.
Republicans and conservative media figures have criticized the decision as “an attack on democracy” and “pro-tyranny.

In the short weeks since the Colorado Supreme Court threw Donald Trump off the ballot on the grounds that he is barred from office for engaging in “insurrection or rebellion” under the Fourteenth Amendment, the apologists for a man who tried to overthrow the constitutional order by fraud and then force have become pious apostles of democracy.
Republicans and conservative media figures have criticized the decision as “an attack on democracy” and “pro-tyranny.

The Colorado Supreme Court has left the justices of the United States Supreme Court in the very uncomfortable position of having to prove that they have the courage of their stated convictions.Yesterday, Colorado’s high court ruled in a 4–3 decision that former President Donald Trump, because of his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, is disqualified from appearing on the ballot in Colorado, based on Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

George Santos, the former Republican representative from New York, seemed like he stepped out of an episode of the HBO political-comedy show Veep. His reality-TV antics and ostentatious fabrications about his life, and the criminal allegations swirling around him, made him a surreal character in an already surreal Congress.

On October 7, the Islamist militant group Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, killed more than 1,400 people in Israel. Israel responded with military operations that have killed several times that number of Palestinians in Gaza, a territory described by Human Rights Watch as an “open-air prison” as a result of an Israeli and Egyptian blockade. In both cases, most of the casualties are civilians.

There’s an expression reporters use, that you’ve “reported yourself out of a story.” That is, you had a hunch or a tip about something, but when you checked the facts, the story didn’t pan out. Sometimes, though, reporters stick to the narrative they’ve decided on in advance, and they don’t let facts get in the way.The United Auto Workers union is striking for a better contract.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis does not often find himself attempting to deliver a unifying message, but in the aftermath of the killing of three Black Floridians by an alleged white supremacist in Jacksonville last week, he tried.“What he did is totally unacceptable in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said during a speech at a vigil for the three victims, A.J. Laguerre, Angela Michelle Carr, and Jerrald Gallion, last Sunday.

Come November of next year, Donald Trump might be elected president of the nation whose democracy he attempted to overthrow. Although it’s early, Trump is polling strongly against his successor, President Joe Biden, despite having been indicted for state and federal crimes, including a conspiracy to keep himself in power after his 2020 election loss.